Your premise is erroneous: as far as anyone knew, we were threatened by Saddam Hussein. That was why Saddam was reluctant to work with the inspectors, and had to be threatened to make concessions, and that was why his accounting for stockpiles was inadequate. In other words, he acted as we would have expected given the intelligence analysis we were operating with. Every Western intelligence service thought he had stockpiles, including France and Germany. That was not the argument. The argument was the adequacy of "containment" to meet the threat. But, of course, the Administration's point was that any interface with terrorists that might lead to a hand off of WMDs superceded any calculation of danger through conventional use, and that we were the prime target of any such event. Thus, the extent of stockpiles has always been beside the point, and what was found after the war, which would be sufficient to reconstitute a program that could easily supply terrorists rapidly, is enough to underscore the danger.
As for the relationship to Al Qaida: the contacts are there, we just do not know how far they went in cooperation. |
